Читать книгу Everything Fails - T Van Santana - Страница 4

I’ve lived on three worlds. Well, technically four.

There’s the Homeworld, full of rich variety and seasons, long summers and nostalgic winters. It’s the land of my ancestors, living and dead. It’s where I learned to walk and talk, read, be a child and a sibling, be a neighbor. Where I learned about dogs and cats and life and death. My grandmother—that’s my mother’s mother—she was my favorite person in the galaxy. As a child, I saw her every day and could think of nothing more to want. All my family was there, all my friends. Everything.

Then a terrible storm came, destroyed my father’s business. Shortly after, he went to work for the CoDex Corporation, whose factory was the sole sustenance of Blackwater, our town. Wasn’t long before he drew notice from upper management and was sent out on long-stretch expeditions, taking him away from us—away from me. To make matters worse, his home office was relocated to another planet, a distant and cold place deeper into unknown space.

I found that planet—The Golden Planet, so-called because of its rolling gold plains and gray skies—hospitable, even if migrating there had torn me from the arms of my grandmother and enervated my connection to the land of my ancestors. On arrival, I was teased for being an alien but did not particularly feel alien. Indeed, in a short time, my grandmother grew concerned. I was becoming too like the Golden inhabitants, she said. I was losing touch with the Homeworld, she said. But I was very young still and unconcerned with such things.

I’ve heard my speech sounds most the Gold, but often it’s confounded folks, making them unable to place precisely where I’m from. That’s cool by me. Helps with secrecy.

It was on the Gold where I met formal education and found a broader world of friendship. Also dating. Well, we called it going together, even though there was typically nowhere to go and little to do. I was popular with the so-called opposite sex and that’s how it was on the Gold.

As I moved up in education, I found the pressure increased, as did social complexities. I began to feel lost in the crowd. Shuffled around. My first run-ins with authority were appeals to those in charge for help and protection, appeals which went awry. I placed trust where I was told it should be placed, where it ought to be, and then got turned away by assholes disinterested in human suffering. It’s the first set of many such occasions. Later on, newer neural networks let me see how my younger appraisals were overblown. But that’s how I saw it back then, on the Gold.

The third world is the Jungle Planet, full of savagery and green. It’s there that I made my proper life, and where we lay our scene. It was there, at an age too young, I found my way into wide open danger. I found my pen and my brush, my pistol and blade. Found the deep forest songs and the faintest rhythms of hidden cities. I ran my original nervous system into the ground—along with most of my original teeth—and ruined my natural endocrine system. I experienced synaptic shutdown, and what I’ve called the Blast. Everyone I knew reached out to me that night, the night of the Blast, even folks on other worlds from other times that could not have known by sensible means. There was no beam or Bubble that could have alerted them. But, somehow, they’d known. They had known and reached for me. And I pushed them all away. Me, or whoever I was, before the Blast.

On the third world, the Jungle, that is where I met Horace and Danielle. It’s the world of Mickie and Wendy. It’s the world of my reconstruction, recapitulation, where I’m trying to get it all right. Trying to fix the mistakes I made. Redress my failure.

So, those are the worlds which I’ve called home. That’s the where. Then when is the dawn of the 32nd Century, the 32C. The beginning of the end.

Oh, wait. The fourth one. The fourth world was the Desert Planet. My time there was with Terry. The first Terry. It was short, barely a few weeks, but it shaped much of what would come, so it’s worth mentioning.